Thank you for this e-mail. It was informative.
Stas Malyshev wrote:
No, and there are tricky parts there. Consider
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q735712. Yes, Lex Luthor held the office
of the President of the USA. In a fictional universe, of course. But the
naive query - every Wikidata item where position held includes "President
of the United States" - would return Lex Luthor as the president as
legitimate as Abraham Lincoln. In fact, there are 79 US presidents
judging by "position held" alone. So clearly, there need to be some
limits. And those limits would be on case-by-case basis.
Sure, but I'm not really worried about potential false positives. I'm
worried that we're building a giant write-only data store.
Right now the best way is use one of the
list-maintaining bots I think.
This sucks. :-(
Unless you're talking about pulling a small set of
values, in which case
Lua/templates are probably the best venue.
I'm not sure what small means here. We have about 46 U.S. Presidents, is
that small enough? Which Lua functions and templates could I use?
We're working on it (mostly thinking right now, but
correct design is
80% of the work, so...). Visualizations already have query capabilities
(mainly because they have strong caching model embedded and because
there are not too many of them and you need to create them so we can
watch the load carefully). Other pages can gain them - probably via some
kind of Lua functionality - as soon as we figure out what's the right
way to do it, hopefully somewhere within the next year (no promise, but
hopefully).
Wikidata began in October 2012. I thought it might take till 2014 or even
2015 to get querying capability into a usable state, but we're now looking
at potentially 2018? This really sucks. I think Wikidata may eventually
have a seismic shift on wiki editing, but currently I don't see any reason
to even contribute to it when it feels like putting data into a giant
system that you can't really get back out. I love Magnus and I have a ton
of respect for him, but I don't want anything to do with anything called
Listeria. It continues to seem like querying is an afterthought for
Wikidata and this continues to boggle my mind.
MZMcBride